Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday February 21, 2012 @04:25PM
from the math-is-for-the-birds dept.

ananyo writes "Even in death, the world's most accomplished parrot continues to amaze. The final experiments involving Alex – a grey parrot trained to count objects – have just been published (abstract). They show that Alex could accurately add together Arabic numerals to a sum of eight, and correctly add three small sets of objects, putting his mathematical abilities on par with (and maybe beyond) those of chimpanzees and other non-human primates."

How do dolphins and octopuses rank? I tried a search w.r.t. octopuses but didn't find anything (and wikipedia has nothing about it).

Octopuses are the smartest invertebrates on Earth. I do sparrow fishing as hobby and they don't stop amazing me, from their ability to deploy decoy legs able to walk alone, annoying ink jets and their fantastic camouflage they are pretty good stealing items too! They should join thepiratebay!(it's a joke, I know the difference between stealing and copying)

Reading the thread for nostalgia purposes, is it weird to be bothered that I didn't notice a post years ago in the discussion on the ethics of bird-keeping someone saying their parrot didn't come from the rain forest because it's Australian? That I missed the chance to inform the nimrod that Australia has extensive rain forests and if not their specific bird then almost certainly the species hailed from those rain forests? That part of the problem with bird ownership is owners' ignorance about birds' natural habitats and behaviors?